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RadioShack declares bankruptcy

Nearly a century after it opened its first store and sent out its first catalog, RadioShack(RSHC) declared bankruptcy on Thursday.

It has struck a deal to sell up to 2,400 of its approximately 4,000 stores and wireless company Sprint(S) will create a "store within a store" in up to 1,750 of those.

RadioShack saidthat its remaining stores are expected to close.

The company's franchise locations, as well as stores in Mexico and Asia, are not included in the deal.

But RadioShack is not completely going away. Customers will still be able to purchase RadioShack products, services and accessories at the approximately 1,750 stores where Sprint will open shop. In fact, Sprint will occupy just one third of those locations, where it will sell devices and plans. The stores will be "co-branded," according to a Sprint spokeswoman.

But with online shopping, those brick-and-mortar stores became dead weight.

RadioShack goes back to 1921, when it opened a store and mail-order operation in Boston to serve the needs of radio officers aboard ships. It was bought in 1963 by Tandy Corporation, a retailer that started as a supplier of leather parts to shoe repair shops.

For a time RadioShack prospered from Americans' growing love affair with technology. It introduced one of the first mass-market personal computers, the TRS-80, in 1977, and one of the first laptops, the Model 100, in 1983. It also was an early seller of both cell phones and satellite television systems.